Question of the Other

Drawn from a series of lectures that Bernhard Waldenfels delivered in honour of the Chinese philosopher Tang Chun-I, The Question of the Other is a collection of seven papers introducing what he calls a new sort of responsive phenomenology. This means that our experience does not start from our own intentions or from our common understanding, but from something that happens and appeals to us, disturbing our projects and forcing us to respond. We only become ourselves by responding to the Other. Hence otherness is not restricted to the otherness of the Other or to that of another order, it rather penetrates ourselves. Bernhard Waldenfels, born in 1934, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1959. He taught at Munich until 1976 when he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum. Since 1999 he is Professor Emeritus. He has been a visiting professor in Rotterdam, Paris, New York, Louvain-la Neuve, Costa Rica, Debrecen, Prague, Rome, Vienna, and Hong Kong. He is a cofounder of the German Society for Phenomenological Research.The tremendous success of China's economic reform, in contrast with the vast difficulties encountered by the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries in their transition, has attracted worldwide attention. Using a historical, comparative and analytic approach grounded in mainstream economics, the authors develop a consistent and rational framework of state-owned enterprises and individual agents to analyze the internal logic of the traditional planning system. They also explain why the Chinese economy grew slowly before the market-oriented reform in 1979 but became one of the fastest growing economies afterwards, and why the vigour/chaos cycle became part of China's reform process. The book also addresses to the questions that whether China can continue its trend of reform and development and become the largest economy in the world in the early 21st century, and what the general implications of China's experience of development and reform are for other developing and transition economies. The first edition has been well-received and is the standard textbook or reference for students and researchers of China studies. In this thoroughly revised edition, the authors have updated the data and information in the book and include a new chapter on the impact of China's WTO accession on its economic reforms and causes of the current deflation. Justin Yifu Lin is Professor and Founding Director of the China Center for Economic Research at Peking University, Reader at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Fang Cai is Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Institute of Demography at The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Zhou Li is Research Fellow at the Institute of Rural Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.